Silver Glow's Journal

by Admiral Biscuit


April 18 [Lorenz Equations]

April 18

I'd opened the window last night because it was so nice out and I was glad I had.  Over the winter the dorm got kind of stale, but now there was a nice fresh breeze coming through and the first thing I did was stick my muzzle up to the window and got a good sniff of the air outside. Then I got dressed in my flight gear and took off.

I wasn't all that far above the trees before I did my first loop. Then I flew over the neighborhood to Aric's house but his truck wasn't there and that worried me a little bit. I tried to put it aside; I knew machines broke sometimes and maybe Winston had but he was clever and probably could have fixed it.

I shouldn't have looked, because that bothered me on my whole morning flight and on my way back I flew over his house again and it still wasn't there.

Peggy still wasn't back, either. She probably would have had her boyfriend take her right to class, unless she had a duffel bag like the one that she took to the resort, then she would want to leave that in our room. Or maybe it was still in the trunk of her car.

It was no good getting worked up so I tried to push them to the back of my mind and worry about the now.  At breakfast, I wasn’t being very social until Christine started stealing little bits of everybody's food to build a little display on her tray. She had a wall made out of shredded wheat and a house of toast and a path made out of bacon where the sausage link worms could travel. Then she brought down her fork and stabbed one and ate it and said that she now understood what it was to be a god.

Christine is a very strange person.

She cheered me up enough that I forgot all about Peggy and Aric for most of breakfast and didn't start thinking about them again until math class. And then I had to push it aside again because we were still talking about Lorenz Equations and how important they were. Instead of using the markerboard, he lowered a movie screen and showed us pictures of the equations being drawn out, and that really helped to explain how it worked and how the spirals formed on their own eigenplanes, because you could actually watch the lines being drawn and see how they were behaving.

Where it really helped was when he started changing the values, which changed the spirals. At some point he said that if they went out they would intersect and he showed us a picture of them which looked like two interconnected loops. But what was really neat was how when he showed us a movie of the lines being made and they made their own spirals for a while and then suddenly started looping around the central point on the other side.

When he explained how that system worked in water, my ears suddenly perked up. He said that if you imagined a big sphere of water with a heater on the bottom and a cooler on the top, and just then it clicked for me why the spirals would do this, because air was the same way and the hot air wanted to go up and the cold air wanted to go down but it got complicated because one blocked the other, so one went one way and the other went the other way and there were all sorts of eddy currents and stuff where the two interacted and that was what the equation was about.

Then he took his neat little graph-maker and showed us how the most minor difference would make different results—but they were predictably different. The two lines started off the same and then they got different after a little while, but no matter what they always wound up together on the two eigenplanes. That, he told us, was called sensitive dependence on initial condition, and he said in our next class he was going to explain to us how we couldn't measure the initial condition.

Peggy was back for lunch and I wanted to ask her if she'd seen the dreamcatcher I made for her but I didn't because maybe she didn't like it and was too nice to say anything so I thought I'd wait until she said something about it, but she didn't. I couldn't tell if that meant she didn't like it or if that meant that she hadn't seen it yet.

She told Christine that her boyfriend had taken her to the Great Wolf Lodge, which has an indoor waterpark. From her description, it sounded like it would be a very fun place to go. It was way up near the top of Michigan at a place called Traverse City and I knew that there was a big bridge near there called the Mackinac Bridge and I asked her if she had seen it and she told me it was too far away for her to see from Traverse City.

Professor Amy talked more about language relativism, explaining how color was named in different languages, and said that there were people who had entire careers just thinking about that. She gave us all a list of colors in English and said that the simple thought would be that they translated directly but that wasn't the case at all. Some languages considered blue and green two different colors, and some thought that they were the same, and the English word for the combined color (because English makes them different colors) was grue. So there were languages like Vietnamese where you had leaf grue and ocean grue. Then she said that there were other splits, like in Russian where light blue and dark blue were two completely different words, but in English they weren't.

I left class confused. Colors were colors; how could there not be the right words to name them? Who was in charge of coming up with a language that didn't know the difference between colors? I guess that Professor Amy's explanations made sense, but it still seemed like an oversight to me. You'd think that even if they hadn't noticed what they'd left out at first somebody else would have added it in later.

I spent dinner pondering that, and I finally came to the conclusion that people would only name colors if they mattered to them, just like other stuff. Earth ponies had a lot of words for plants and soil that we never used, and unicorns had their words for spells, and of course we had our words for clouds and sky and I guess to an earth pony they don't need to know exactly what kind of cloud it is and I don't need to know what kind of dirt it is and neither of us need to know about spells. So maybe for some people it wasn't as important to be specific about colors.

When I got back to my room I saw that Aric had sent me a telegram; he'd said that he was too tired to go to Durach but that I could come over after it was done and to just let myself in because he would be in bed. So I wound up excusing myself early because I really couldn't concentrate on the game, and I flew over to Aric's house and let myself in with his hidden key and then went up to his room.

He was fast asleep, so I climbed into bed next to him as quietly as possible so that I wouldn't wake him up and then I snuggled up against his side. I was a little mad that he had gotten back so late and hadn’t called me and was asleep instead of playing with me, and I was tempted to lift up the covers and see if I could wake him up the fun way, but I didn’t. I just closed my eyes and let the familiar scents of him and his room fill my senses until I was asleep.